Big tech takes repentance tour to Davos to fend off backlash

Bloomberg

Google’s top executive said the search giant would welcome higher taxes. Uber Technologies Inc.’s new CEO said it must be more accommodating with regulators. Salesforce.com Inc.’s veteran leader Marc Benioff said Silicon Valley has been arrogant and compared Facebook to the tobacco industry.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, technology executives struck a conciliatory note in an acknowledgement of a new reality for the world’s largest technology companies. Unlike previous years at the gathering in Switzerland of the global elite, the companies are no longer seen primarily as positive engines of economic growth. Governments, business leaders and the general public are coming to view Silicon Valley’s power and influence with caution and suspicion.
“We’re the same as any other industry,” Marc Benioff, the founder of the business software company Salesforce.com Inc., valued at
$82 billion, said. “Financial services, consumer product goods, food—in technology, the government’s going to have to be involved. There is some regulation, but there probably will have to be more.”
The self-reflection comes in response to criticism the industry is facing globally on a range of critical issues: election interference by Russia-backed groups; spreading misinformation; the distribution of extremist content; lackluster privacy protections; antitrust violations; tax avoidance; and the threat of massive job losses as a result of advances in automation and artificial intelligence. New warnings are being raised about the physiological effects of technology, including smartphone addiction and social media use harming mental health.
The companies said they want to work with authorities on a range of challenges, including accepting higher taxes. “At Google, we want to serve everyone in the world—so billions of users every day—and with that comes a lot of responsibility,” CEO Sundar Pichai said.
“So we need to be open to feedback and engage more with the external world,” he said.
Dara Khosrowshahi, who took over as CEO at Uber in 2017 amid various government investigations related to the company’s aggressive business tactics, used Davos to continue a global apology tour. He said the ride-hailing startup took shortcuts in its quest for growth and now must work with regulators like London’s transportation authority, whose decision to revoke Uber’s taxi license is being appealed.
The World Economic Forum is part of a wider European tour by many tech executives. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, pledged in a speech in Brussels that the company would “do better” to boost privacy, combat hate speech and be more aggressive in combating efforts to manipulate its platform to influence elections. Sandberg and Pichai also met separately with French President Emmanuel Macron, who has threatened to increase taxes on US tech companies, to tout new research centres and hiring.
Yet for all the diplomacy, many global leaders want to see companies take more action. UK PM Theresa May, a frequent critic of social media companies for not doing enough to prevent the spread of extremist content online, used a speech at Davos to urge investors to sell shares of technology companies if they don’t take more social responsibility, a clear swipe at Facebook, Twitter Inc. and Google’s YouTube. “Technology companies still need to go further in stepping up their responsibilities for dealing with harmful and illegal online activity,” May said.
George Soros struck out at Facebook and Google, declaring them monopolies that foster addiction, threaten independent thinking and risk empowering state-sponsored surveillance. “They deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide,” Soros said Davos.
Many technology executives acknowledged concerns about the consequences of automation and artificial intelligence on the global workforce. Pichai said companies must be open when explaining how the technology is being applied.